Uh Oh: California’s Push For EVs Could Be Bad For The Environment

We’ve seen this before: as climate cultists push to solve a tiny increase in the world’s global temperature, something entirely expected during a Holocene warm period, their solutions create actual environmental issues. The push for biofuels leads to clearcutting jungles in Asia, with animals like orangutans intentionally hunted. Solar panel manufacturing leads to environmental messes, such as with Solyndra, and with all the areas that are mined for precious metals. The LA Times is running multiple pieces, the first of which is a video with the headline and subhead

Is California’s electric car revolution bad for the planet?
By 2035, California will ban the sale of gas-powered cars in an effort to address climate change and push drivers toward electric vehicles. But that means we’ll need more raw materials to build electric car batteries – like lithium, which is typically sourced and refined abroad – until now.

And a long piece. A really long piece (available at Yahoo News if you get the firewall)

California’s electric car revolution, designed to save the planet, also unleashes a toll on it

The precious cargo on the ship docked in San Diego Bay was strikingly small for a vessel built to drag oil rigs out to sea. Machines tethered to this hulking ship had plucked rocks the size of a child’s fist from the ocean floor thousands of miles into the Pacific.

The mission was delicate and controversial — with broad implications for the planet.

Investors are betting tens of millions of dollars that these black nodules packed with metals used in electric car batteries are the ticket for the United States to recapture supremacy over the green economy — and to keep up with a global transportation revolution started by California.

Alongside his docked ship, Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Company, held in his hand one of the nodules he argues can help save the planet. “We have to be bold and we have to be prepared to look at new frontiers,” he said. “Climate change isn’t something that’s waiting around for us to figure it out.”

The urgency with which his company and a handful of others are moving to start scraping the seabed for these materials alarms oceanographers and advocates, who warn they are literally in uncharted waters. Much is unknown about life on the deep sea floor, and vacuuming swaths of it clean threatens to have unintended and far-reaching consequences.

That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard they were scraping the bottom of the sea for the materials, potentially destroying the habitat, one which we know little about.

The drama playing out in the deep sea is just one act in a fast unfolding, ethically challenging and economically complex debate that stretches around the world, from the cobalt mines of Congo to the corridors of the Biden White House to fragile desert habitats throughout the West where vast deposits of lithium lay beneath the ground.

The state of California is inexorably intertwined in this drama. Not just because extraction companies are aggressively surveying the state’s landscapes for opportunities to mine and process the materials. But because California is leading the drive toward electric cars.

Interestingly, the people in California who are pushing this are mostly not driving EVs themselves. Go figure.

The sprint to supply automakers with heavy duty lithium batteries is propelled by climate-conscious countries like the United States that aspire to abandon gas-powered cars and SUVs. They are racing to secure the materials needed to go electric, and the Biden administration is under pressure to fast-track mammoth extraction projects that threaten to unleash their own environmental fallout.

In far-flung patches of the ocean floor, at Native American ancestral sites, and on some of the most pristine federal lands, extraction and mining companies are branding themselves stewards of sustainability, warning the planet will suffer if digging and scraping are delayed. All the prospecting is giving pause to some of the environmental groups championing climate action, as they assess whether the sacrifice needed to curb warming is being shared fairly.

“Front-line communities affected by mining are asking the rest of us: What sacrifice are you making?” said John Hadder, executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, a Nevada group fighting a proposed massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass, near the Oregon border. “You are asking us to have our community and environment permanently disrupted. All you are doing is maybe driving a different car.”

So, even with the environmental destruction they still drag their Leftist politics into it. Anyhow, it is a really long piece, if you want to read it, which softly highlights the amount of environmental destruction will be caused on the land and in the sea, and that so many environmentalists, who also believe in ‘climate change’, are having second thoughts. Not mentioned is the environmental issue from used lithium batteries: what do you do with them when they are at end of life?